Black economic success itself increased the risk of being lynched.

Evidence

What if a black person through some miracle was fortunate enough to build a successful business? One might assume they would be beyond the reach of slavery’s shape-shifting traps. They could not be arrested for vagrancy, and they would not be subject to restrictive, wealth-depleting sharecropping agreements. But their very success put a target on their back. In actuality, these were the people most at risk of succumbing to the deadliest consequences of Slavery 2.0: the lynching noose. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 286

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: success as a death sentence — the counterintuitive inversion of the meritocratic reward logic.